A professional player is smarter than a college man. He uses his noodle. He knows what to do and when to do it. He rarely goes up in the air as is the case with most of our college players when they get in a tight place.
I was thrown into a position where I had to learn a new language, become professional and not be just that child anymore coming into a team. I was able to learn from players that were so experienced at such a high level. You can't get that anywhere else. Nothing against college, but you can't get that in college.
Without the AJGA, it would be very difficult for the college coaches to find us. Every junior golfer around the country knows about the AJGA and knows that's the way to get to college. And the way to get beyond college.
I think school is very important and I personally had a great experience at North Carolina, which helped shape me as a basketball player and a person. Every once in a while, you will have a player who can make the jump and have an immediate impact on the professional level, but most of the players who come out would absolutely benefit from going to college.
Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmer's college. The book first, then the work.
Every American college student goes to college with a hard drive. They take their laptop. There's not a CD player in sight.
Certainly, our work has identified CTE in many professional football players, but we're also seeing it in a very high percentage of college players.
The saving of empty beer and liquor bottles is a strange college phenomenon. I bet most of you college students reading this right now have some empties on a shelf in your room. Everyone knows how much college kids like to drink, do we really need to display it? It's a good thing, though, that this trend stops after college. Wouldn't it be weird if your parents had empty wine bottles up on their bedroom wall?
By the time a kid goes to college, if he's taking math or science, at least he knows, or you hope he knows, some basics. But if you're teaching history in college, you have a lot of damage to undo. You basically have to start over because so much of what a kid has already learned is just wrong.
I went to college in the Air Force, and I went to college at the University of Maryland, who had college campuses on Air Force bases.
When I went to college, I went to a junior college. I wanted to go to the University of Alabama but had to go to junior college first to get my GPA up. I did a half-year of junior college, then dropped out and had my daughter. College was always an opportunity to go back. But she, my daughter, was my support. I gave up everything for her.
When you go to college, and you talk about your college experience, there's a lot of revisionist history that goes along with it. You tend to think of yourself as, 'Oh, I got all of the girls. I was the best athlete on the team. I was a straight-A student.' And that's probably not the case.
I graduated from college when I was 20. To get enough money to finish college, I went into the ROTC, and I was an officer in the Air Force before I could buy a drink.
Having a father as a football and a baseball coach, I grew up around college baseball players, college football players, like, I just knew sports my whole life.
The ticket out of the Depression was an education, a college degree. It really didn't matter if you knew anything. You just had to have the degree. My dad, up until the last two years of his life, thought he had failed miserably with me 'cause I didn't go to college. I mean, you've seen postgame interviews with the star of the game and the players always talk about how proud his parents are because he's the first guy in his family ever to attend college. I'm the first in my family not to! I'm the first of my family not to have a degree. It's thrown everybody for a loop.
Our mission at Khan Academy is a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere, and college readiness is a crucial part of that. We want to help as many students as possible prepare for college and for life, and since the SAT measures preparedness for college, our partnership with the College Board is a natural fit.
We want the best sort of 500 players or so that we can possibly get, and the best 500 players typically have a very similar background. They've played three or four years of college football. They're mature. They're professional.